Flying Sweden [uDG 2011]

Work shut down due to the hurricane, so I had an entire guilt-free weekend to work on Flying Sweden. Building Mode is in pretty good shape, so I worked on Battle Mode. Here is Sweden in the orientation you'll see her in Battle Mode, firing off some rockets:

This week, I'm going to focus on enemy AI and spawning waves of enemies in an intelligent manner.

(Aug 29, 2011 11:46 PM)Fenris Wrote: Right.
So, I've been off the forum for a couple of years, and the first thing I see upon returning is a weaponized version of my country? God, I've missed you guys.

Worked on my 10.6.8 MacBook. Wow. In terms of style and polish, the most successful entry I have looked at so far. I'm not sure if this is a bug or feature, but the most breaking thing I encountered that made the game less fun that it should be (because it basically sapped out all the difficulty) was that you could drop buildings on top of each other, which basically made upgrading pointless because stacking buildings was more efficient for your money.
Some other thoughts I had that may or may not be useful to you:
* I wish building/healing/upgrading had hotkeys since the player does it so frequently. Especially on the first round where you have to build a ton of buildings on one round.
* The cost of healing buildings seemed to be too expensive to be worth it, especially since upgrading heals to full.
* There doesn't seem to be much strategy to the action segments- most of the time I just slid my cursor up and down the screen and nothing could really touch me (especially if you have 5 dallahasts stacked across Sweden.)
* Though the above sort of makes this problem unimportant, the projectiles in the action segments obscure the action a bit with all the smoke they make.
Overall this is really great and probably will be one of my personal favorites- I think if the design were just tweaked to be a bit more challenging and balanced, the game would be pretty much perfect.

(Oct 1, 2011 02:18 PM)phydeaux Wrote: Worked on my 10.6.8 MacBook. Wow. In terms of style and polish, the most successful entry I have looked at so far. I'm not sure if this is a bug or feature, but the most breaking thing I encountered that made the game less fun that it should be (because it basically sapped out all the difficulty) was that you could drop buildings on top of each other, which basically made upgrading pointless because stacking buildings was more efficient for your money.
Some other thoughts I had that may or may not be useful to you:
* I wish building/healing/upgrading had hotkeys since the player does it so frequently. Especially on the first round where you have to build a ton of buildings on one round.
* The cost of healing buildings seemed to be too expensive to be worth it, especially since upgrading heals to full.
* There doesn't seem to be much strategy to the action segments- most of the time I just slid my cursor up and down the screen and nothing could really touch me (especially if you have 5 dallahasts stacked across Sweden.)
* Though the above sort of makes this problem unimportant, the projectiles in the action segments obscure the action a bit with all the smoke they make.
Overall this is really great and probably will be one of my personal favorites- I think if the design were just tweaked to be a bit more challenging and balanced, the game would be pretty much perfect.

Thanks so much for the feedback! Building buildings on top of each other is definitely a bug. I didn't have time to fix it before the deadline, but will get it fixed in the next build, along with some balance changes. Hotkeys for healing is a great idea. I also want to put better feedback in for building damage, so you don't have to click on each building to see their health. Another thing that didn't make it in the contest build was an ability system in battle mode which let you fire one-off abilities provided by certain buildings. It made battle much more strategic, but had some issues I didn't have time to fix.

After seeing the screenshots to this, people in a local game development group I'm part of all decided to work together to create a 2D game built on Unity. We are learning now... hopefully we can get to this point. Please keep in touch Will, as I will have questions for you
Are you on Twitter?

(Oct 1, 2011 03:41 PM)funkboy Wrote: After seeing the screenshots to this, people in a local game development group I'm part of all decided to work together to create a 2D game built on Unity. We are learning now... hopefully we can get to this point. Please keep in touch Will, as I will have questions for you
Are you on Twitter?

That's great! I'll be sure to include lots of details on developing 2D games in Unity if I am asked to do a postmortem. You can find me on twitter @willrmiller. Also, drop me a line at me< at >willrmiller_dot_com. Thanks for checking out our game!

The lack of battle complexity is the only absolute major flaw I can find with this game. A few small things, like the seemingly unbalanced pressure on money vs. the two other resources, were frustrating, but passable. Other than that, it's a quality game and if it were me, I'd want to make sure that it doesn't end up on any of the app stores in the Lugaru fashion.